Virtue Broadcst Share Discussion Threads

[clocktower] 19/10/2004 11:21

Safman, count yourself very lucky, think about the souls that bought them off you. With the profit you made, consider how many you could buy now. IF is always easy to say..If this If that...just I did, not IF.:-)

[safman] 19/10/2004 10:47

bada ..had 900K.. its a good holding when u have around 114 mill shares in issue.. .. when u have over 700 mill .. it paltry..insignificant..i wish i sold out at 7-8p..instead 6p/5p/4p. still have 20K left.. as a gesture..

saffy.

[3parsnips] 19/10/2004 10:44

Virtue Communications

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New CEO Jon King says : "We've grown very strongly over the last two years, with seven figure profits in the last year, as a consequence we had cash." So he is saying (WTV) made over : £1 Million + (PROFIT) LAST YEAR...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(HTML) version from davidcod's pdf file that was posted yesterday..

Re : "World Pursues Continental Shift"

------------------------------------------
AVI Interactive article : ( OCTOBER 2004 )
------------------------------------------

The merger of World Television with Virtue Communications shows how seriously the video producer is taking web distribution, but there were also other motives
for the deal.

Jon King :It will be the relative ability of companies to adopt global digital distribution that will differentiate between those that succeed and those that fail.

-----------------------------------------

A FEW YEARS AGO,a whiff of uncertainty arose when old generation corporate video production companies decided to get together with webcasting companies.
But the video and online worlds are now more in step with each other. Many producers, though not all, are used to providing webcasting services and many corporate and public organisations, though not all, are enthusiastically using them.

So World Television,by merging with webcasting specialist Virtue Communications might look at first sight like it is a late mover. However, World has provided a webcasting service, which has been used by clients such as BP and the World Economic Forum, since its acquisition in 2002 of webcaster UCTX.

So why did World decide to get together with Virtue? Jon King, World's chief operating officer, answers that it is about improving World's online offering, but also has to do with achieving scale and expanding into new business areas and geographical territories.

But before going into depth about that, it's worth pausing to set out the deal that saw the two companies combining. World was a UK limited company with a private investor base and a majority shareholding held by the founding partners. Virtue's shares are publicly traded on the Alternative Investment
Market (AIM) World's shareholders have between 55-60 per cent of the enlarged Virtue Communications Group shares.

King has been made ceo of the Virtue Broadcasting Group, and will oversee the integration of World and Virtue as one company. He expects this to take place by Christmas,but would not say if either or both names would disappear.

He does say that World has spent the last two years looking for ways to grow by either acquisition or merger.'We've grown very strongly over the last two years, with seven figure profits in the last year.

As a consequence we had cash. We wanted to do something different but primar-
ily we wanted to get real European scale.'Virtue was not the only name on the list of companies World has talked to. 'Over the last couple of years we have
had a number of conversations with companies similar to us, and sometimes with companies that arn't like us, but [Virtue] is really the one that seems to be the best feel to do at this point,' says King.

SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES

The companies are similar in that they both provide webcasting services to large corporate clients and are both headquartered in London. However, World also provides a wide range of managed services including consultancy,
business television, video production, event production,broadcast PR and arranging interviews with broadcasters,archive management, and programming creation.

It has a presence in New Zealand and in Switzerland, catering for major clients such as Nestlé and the World Economic Forum.Virtue's business is concentrated on webcasting, particularly in the field of investor relations. But it had also
branched out into webconferencing by acquiring Foroso Communications of Germany in May of this year.Other fairly recent acquisitions include Kamera of Sweden in January of this year,and Unit.net in July 2003. Unit.net was a Swiss based company with subsidiaries in the UK,Germany and Spain.

Such deals have given Virtue offices in Zurich, Frankfurt,Stockholm, Madrid and Sydney and a client list including Deutsche Post, Swisscom, Microsoft and Grupo Santander.

In May, the company reported it had finished the process of consolidating these operations, leaving it with one R&D team, one operational centre and one technology platform.King indicates that the automation made possible by
Virtue's technology was a big attraction, because it quickly makes webcasts available on demand. 'It's probably the best automated webcasting product in
Europe,if not the world.In the past it has been a few hours between live webcasts turning into on-demand webcasts.The automated software makes it possible for the material to go on demand within minutes of the live webcast.'

Virtue packages its technology for sale to both end users and to communications agencies,and it provides services to support clients. Compared with World, it is
positioned further towards the commodity end of the communications market. World sits at the bespoke managed services end and so the new organisation will be able to offer a wider range of options to its clients.

This will be done, says King, after a period of talking to clients of both companies, first ensuring they are being serviced during the integration period and then finding out what they want from the new organisation.

CLIENT SERVICING + MERGER ACTIVITY :

World and Virtue have few clients in common, one being Nestlé. Whereas World has worked on this client's AGM ,providing a fully managed, high production value webcasting service and also setting up interviews via satellite between broadcasters and company executives, Virtue has been servicing a high number of smaller scale investor relations events.King believes that Virtue's other
European clients may be ready to talk to World about bespoke services.

' Hypothetically,if you're talking to Banco de Espana about investor relations it's entirely logical that you might want to talk to them about producing video for their AGM.'

But this won't involve moving World staff from London into the European offices. 'We're creating an overlay team of specialists who will be on call and available to talk to a clients about projects of complexity and scale that require managed services, as an adjunct to some of the existing commodity type services. Alternatively, we might be adding a commodity type service to a managed service.'King argues that a further benefit of the deal is that
because World had not been particularly active in investor relations, it is not cannibalising its own business by joining with Virtue.

Another interesting consequence of the merger is that King finds himself vending Virtue's webcasting solution to other production and PR companies that are nominally World's competitors. This reseller channel will continue, he
says. 'We work on a very friendly, co-operative basis,supporting the activities of people who in principle might be competitors, but we know we're delivering them a service and we don't want to jeopardise that.'

With Virtue's webconferencing solutions, Virtue Meeting Centre and Virtue Training Centre, the intention is to retain them and market them to World's clients.Even more than webcasting, this takes World beyond producing/delivering
video for clients and into allowing clients to manage their own audio and data driven communications.

'We are very serious about webconferencing to support internal and external corporate communications for distributed teams,' says King. 'It will be a strong new element in our product portfolio. Virtue Meeting Centre now fully
integrates with telephone conferencing to enable full interactive data and content sharing alongside group discussions using Voice over IP.'

'Clients are already using and will be using [webconferencing] more and more across their intranets and extranets to communicate with each other. What we are trying to do is to make sure that we embrace the technological advances which allow clients to do more different things more quickly and more cost
effectively than they can do at the moment.'

HTML :

pdf file :


---------------
3Parsnips

[badabing] 19/10/2004 10:37

Saffy,

Hope you sold some on the way up then !....what's your position now, if you don't mind me asking that is.....

[safman] 19/10/2004 10:35

the lowest VTB has been on a spread of 1-1.5p.. with buying at 1.37p.. i should know ..because i bought..

saffy..

[badabing] 19/10/2004 10:33

Maybe but it has been down to 1.25 previously.....

[bungeetrader] 19/10/2004 08:07

Not a pretty looking chart at the top of the page. Surely this has to be the bottom?!?!?

[aerotus] 18/10/2004 22:53

NEWS NEXT WEEK!

[tom2468] 18/10/2004 22:50

I just think this cloud has a silver lining after all

night night

[topbidd] 18/10/2004 19:43

Bada,

For what it is worth, I think they have the tools in place to start making the right strides forward, they are positioned within, what I believe will be a rapidly growing industry, they already have the ears of a lot of blue chip companies.
The question, imo, should be, have the current incumbents of the board got the required guile, ambition & business acumen to translate this position to the bottom line by delivering new contracts & generating more revenue from their existing client list.
The jury are out & I for one wait with baited breath.

[exotic] 18/10/2004 19:34

Yes it's very strange. The only possibilities I can think of are:

They want to preserve company resources where ever possible?
They can't be bothered?
They're worried what their own investors will think of their products?

[nicknamesrsilly] 18/10/2004 19:25

Unbelievable- they brag about accepting awards from other luvvies and talk about
broadcasting the AGM's of other companies, then when it comes to their own meetings, it is difficult to imagine how they could be more obscure and uncommunicative.

If I was a prospective client of WTV/VTB, I would check bulletin boards such as this to see how the company communicates with it's own investors and to see the state of their investor relations. At present, I would get a very unfavourable impression and would definately not use the company.

Whether they intend it or not, the company give off vibes of being very arrogant, remote and not at all interested in any sort of dialogue with their shareholders. I just hope they have some earth shattering news up their sleeve which will rescue the share price, but am not holding my breath. Failing that, the company now have the option of buying their shares on the market, but if they are doing as well as they seem to think they are, they should not need to resort to measures such as this.

[3parsnips] 18/10/2004 19:20

Virtue communications

Hi davidcod..Well spotted on the AVI interactive info on WTV.

As there was only one objection as far as I could see...to your starting a NEW thread for the re-named company..looks like everyone else is happy for you to
do the honours...over to you...

Lets hope we can move onwards & upwards when we get the New epic

Hi trixter & Kenway well spotted on the info on the WTV wedbsite..

------------
3Parsnips

[clocktower] 18/10/2004 16:50

Bada, Who needs Mensa, take my word for it as with MLB things will get better..much better but could look worse.

[badabing] 18/10/2004 16:40

Luchan....me too....but it still looks like the the taxman will be getting these come April 2005......

[luchan] 18/10/2004 16:39

Bada-

I'm holding on the basis that it can't get much worse & if we had all not got carried away with our own hype we would not be sitting here asking ourselves WHY.The share price will recover but time is the key IMO.

luchan.

[topbidd] 18/10/2004 16:26

Davidcod,

I think you've just found something to go into the new thread.

[badabing] 18/10/2004 16:24

Guys,

This is really getting confusing...so many mixed messages now....is this a winner or should it be given a decent burial...all the words say it is a winner but the numbers just do not add up....can anyone explain why this worth holding/buying or who can explain why should it be sold and written off please? I realise this is a pretty enormous task and could need the combined talent and brainpower of MENSA but I honestly cannot fathom out what is really going on here anymore.....

[clocktower] 18/10/2004 16:11

Are not the "FANTASTIC PEOPLE" the ones that gave WTV...VTB...so to upholster thier own pockets with shareholders funds?

[davidcod] 18/10/2004 16:06

check this out:

[trixter] 18/10/2004 16:02

World Television is delighted to announce that it has been voted 'Production Company of the Year' at the recent AV Awards held on the 13th October 2004.

The AV Magazine Awards recognise the best work from companies, people and projects in the communications sector. The award was given in recognition of World Television's commitment to new communications initiatives based on the benefits we offer our clients and our technical innovation and imaginative solutions to internal and external communications issues.


"I'm thrilled that we've won this award and have been recognised by our peers. It's a wonderful achievement to have been ranked number one Production Company in such a tough competitive environment," said Jon King, CEO, World Television.

"2004 has been an excellent year for us – we've outperformed the market and seen turnover growth of over 40% in the last year delivering 7 figure profits. World Television is now delivering Top 5 ROI among television and production companies. Our recent merger with Virtue Communications is a further step in creating an integrated communications service company offering clients integrated communications solutions, with digital delivery at its heart.''

Jon King added, "Our success is down to our fantastic people and great clients and I personally thank them.''

[kenway] 18/10/2004 16:00

From WTV`s web site " World television voted production company of the year 2004"

[shirishg] 18/10/2004 15:53

Post removed by ADVFN

[jonnybgoode] 18/10/2004 15:45

blimey, if things go well elsewhere I shall be able to buy back at less than I ahd to sell for! Thats assuming there is a reason to buy back!